I’ve been catching up on e-mails from 1994 and 1995. I had a cat named Satan, a clam named Poop, and a frog named Butthole. I remember Satan but forgot about Poop and Butthole. There was a channel catfish but I don’t think I gave that beast a name. I have foggy memories of a friend and I unloading that fish into the East River. This was after the owner of a local aquarium store refused to take custody of the thing, saying that channel cats just grow and grow and grow until they bust out of almost any fish tank. Is that even true? That is exactly what I was told by a gentleman at a store I think was called “Age of Aquariums” on First or Second Avenue in Yorkville.
I am not feeling nostalgic. I don’t do nostalgia. I just happened across a 70 megabyte .TAR file named IRC.TAR. This enormous pile of text contains IRC chat logs, e-mails, and documents from as far back as 1992. I don’t think I owned a computer until 1994 so I must have written those earliest ones at the weird job on Long Island.
I can only stand to read so much of my own writing, however novel it might seem to rediscover it after 25 years. Here is a bit from October, 1992, about a defunct diner called The Golden Rule, formerly at Broadway and 207th Street in Manhattan:
I have to eat at The Golden Rule Diner, on Broadway and 207th Street. It is like a lot of places. The same photographs of plastic eggs, rubber steaks and, for all anybody knows, wax French Fries populate the menus made by a seemingly popular New Jersey menu-making firm. The Golden Rule is like almost anyplace I can remember eating. You sit in your booth forever, suavely eavesdropping on adjacent conversation. The acoustics are someone across the room sounds as clear as the person next to you. It is dazzling when you are there alone, but I would imagine it could get a stifle confusing if you were with another person and unable to draw their words into relief above the conversation hive weaving itself into a gutting sail that keeps the place afloat.
What did I eat the last time, Golden Rule? I think it was Bluefish. Yes, it was. I sat across from an old, old looking man with long, well-kept hair that flowed like vomit from his head. He complained loudly and bitterly, insulting everything, throwing food on the floor and demanding recompense. The waitress seemed familiar with the bawling, bringing some gravity to the otherwise facetious display. That griping, senile anger endures from the moment of birth to the dying breathe of age. It is never purged, never expelled, never vanquished or consoled. It festers in the wounds gathered throughout life.
In front of me was a lovely woman too lovely and too beautiful and too too sweet for me to even fathom. She read her book, dramatically lurching her head around to look out the window, maybe trying to impress upon the crowd that she was waiting for some person some thing some feeling. She read and read, reminding me of those I had known who read one book after another, hurling each finished tome into a corner with one hand while the other hand grabbed another book. On and on I see people read but they never talk about what they read. They just keep reading.
When she spasmodically bolted her head backwards my own attention was drawn to the nondescript people passing along. Oh how I love you Golden Rule. Not for your food not for your people not for your atmosphere but because I return here repeatedly. Only because I have visited here so many times sat in the same place stared out the same window. Isn’t that reason enough for you to be my favorite?
Yes, it as bluefish with rice, french fries and peas. What can I say except that from the first bite I knew this would be no regular meal of fish. It sat in my jaw like cud in the cheeks of a cow. It seemed to grow larger, occupying more and more space in my mouth until I, unable to swallow, discretely spit it into my napkin. It was the worst fish in town, probably the worst place to eat in all the 50 states. After one bite the familiar feeling of nausea and dizziness quietly stormed my brain and stomped through my body. I looked up and around, darting my eyes about as one is prone to do when overwhelming sickness visits.
It was time for a French Fry. I grabbed one and bit it at its middle. If the fish was a sugared mixture of pencil erasers and paste the french fries were soft whetstones, grinding to the bite and head-splitting in their consistency. And the peas – well, I had to dowse the whetstones with something – the peas tasted like earth. I don’t eat much earth but I know where it could be had: The Golden Rule Diner on Broadway and 207th Street in Manhattan. Now serving sand, topsoil, mud, fungus and other organic materials.
Again, the intoxicating feeling of swift sickness and abhorrent nausea had consumed my body. I looked up at myself in the wall-length mirror. I had gone ghastly pale. My hair stood in all directions after I gripped my forehead while reminiscing about with this familiar sickness. How many times, Golden Rule, have we been through this? I have walked from the tip of Manhattan to its finis and you are the worst restaurant in town. It is a farce to eat here. It is comical. Maybe you’d be all right for burgers.
Every move that anyone made in the place deepened my nausea. The woman lurching to her rear for no discernible reason made my head swim through oceans of bile. I think I could trace the path her head took. It assumed a technicolor grace and landing, sprinkling the air with confetti, glitter, residue from excitement bursting into her head to prompt this drastic display of motion.
Hmm. I vaguely remember writing that. The waiter at The Golden Rule was a bit prickly. If I did not eat every last bite of whatever food I ordered he would frown, and begrudgingly write out the check. He may have reserved that reaction for those frequent times when I ate almost nothing, but the selective nature of memory has him always frowning.
Finding such a mountain of text reminds of the one that got away. NOTES.doc. It was into NOTES.doc that I spilled out the story of my such that I had one in 1993. While working on legitimate things I kept NOTES opened in a tiny, basically invisible window. I could not see the words as I typed them into NOTES but I knew they were being recorded. I wanted to save that time in my life, and unlike most things I write I thought of it as a time capsule that I would return to and actually read again.
One day it was gone. Poof. From a DOS prompt I did something needlessly brave. Whatever action I performed caused NOTES to go from hundreds of K to zero. That hurt.